This post may contain affiliate links. Please pardon me as I continue posting about Ancient Egypt. It’s just that the Creek Kids and I are a bit obsessed with all things Egypt, much to my surprise. We are all really enjoying our history curriculum. It has been so much fun. I’m going to cram several things into one post, rather than bombard you with three or four separate ones. So if you aren’t interested in ancient Egypt, perhaps you may want to skip this one (or at least skim it for the photos). Here’s what I’ll cover in this post: Our in-house Lego expert, The Husband, built a Lego pyramid with the Creek Kids. Inside, I had hidden two pouches of treasure and the kids pretended to be archeologists who had just discovered a new pyramid. They removed the pouches carefully. Inside the pouches, I had placed some small objects, spray painted gold (small animal figures, beads, buttons, little wooden craft blocks, etc.). I cut square pieces of leftover fabric, placed the items inside, and tied them closed with yarn.
I printed cartouche’s with their names in hieroglyphics and rolled it up as a scroll, so that it would fit. (Note that via the cartouche website, you could type a whole message in hieroglyphics and have your kids decode it, too.) Another pyramid project we did was from the Story of the World Activity Guide. We used sugar cubes to make a pyramid. This project took some time for me to gather supplies and set up, but only a few minutes for the kids to put together. One child got easily frustrated that the sugar cubes were not sticking well with the mod-podge and kept moving around. But we managed to get them glued together and sprinkled sand on the top layer of glue. I used a small wooden craft block painted gold for the top piece. Next, we went to the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland (free admission, free street parking on Sunday or $4 garage parking 1 block away). It is about an hour’s drive from where we live, and totally worth it. Thanks to Rivka at Tinderbox Homeschool for writing about this on her blog.
I had never heard of this museum and now my entire family and I cannot wait to go back. They had an amazing array of ancient artifacts from all over the world. If you are studying any ancient civilization and can manage a trip here, I highly recommend it. We, of course, focused mainly on Egypt and here is what we found. Right inside the entrance they have their Art Cart, which contained a quilt with various pockets of Egyptian items, including costumes, magnet sets, coloring pages, smelling jars of popular foods of the time, books and much, much more. You could check these things out and take them with you around the museum. Firefly checked out one of the costumes and wore it around the exhibits. I checked out a magnet set and a stack of Look and Find cards for The Queen Bee and Love Bug. When Love Bug got bored, we gave him the things from the Art Cart to play with while we continued looking. The kids were so excited to see many of the real objects we had been learning so much about, including a real mummy!
Here’s Firefly, in his costume, checking out the sarcophaguses. And here was one of Mommy’s favorite parts… The museum store, with a whole wall of wonderful books, games, toys, etc., etc., of all the ancient civilizations! I did restrain myself and only bought a couple of things. Back at home, our next adventure was to play with all of the wonderful things we’ve made since we began to study Egypt: our mini Nile River with “reeds” (grass seed), our reed boats made from willow branches, our Lego pyramid and treasures, our sugar cube pyramids and our Egypt Toob figures. And now, we’ll move on to chapter 5 in SOTW. And, yikes, I just realized we start our full schedule of school subjects in just three weeks and I have an enormous amount of planning to do before then. I am so glad we took the time to put so much of our focus on history this summer. All three kids are so engaged in learning about it. Yes, even my 2.5 year old talks about “Da Nile Rivah” and “Mommies” (mummies) non-stop.
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